Sacred Mysteries: Christopher Howse finds that St Ninian, a popular
Scottish patron, is an impostor

A saint has just been exploded, like Bunbury in The Importance of Being Earnest. St Ninian, the most famous saint of Scotland, after St Columba, is associated with Whithorn in Galloway, which tourists and pilgrims visit in his memory. But Dr Andrew Breeze, a Celtic philologist, declares: “There is not a single historical or philological reason for belief in St Ninian’s existence.”

This will annoy people. “Ninian is the man who first brought the Christian faith to Scotland,” the Daily Record explained when Pope Benedict landed in Scotland on

St Ninian’s Day 2010. “He is to the Scots what St Patrick is to the Irish.”

My nominal patron being St Christopher, I do get a little tired of people telling me that the Church has declared he never existed. In the Roman Martyrology revised in 2001, Christopher is listed for July 25, marked universally as St James’s Day. But St Christopher can still be commemorated, even if nothing is known of his life.

For St Ninian (pictured here in a window at Castell Coch), historical and geographical claims are made. They need examining. The best source is Bede’s History, finished in 731. Before Columba’s time, it says, the southern Picts were converted by “Ninia”, who was “a most reverend bishop and holy man of the British nation, who had been regularly instructed at Rome”.

His episcopal see, wrote Bede, “named after St Martin the bishop, and famous for a stately church (wherein he and many other saints rest in the body), is still in existence among the English nation. The place belongs to the province of the Bernicians [part of later Northumbria], and is generally called the White House [Candida Casa], because he there built a church of stone.”

A striking point is the absence of references to Ninian in early Celtic annals, as there are for St Patrick,

St Columba or St David. He does not even appear in the genealogies that the Welsh provided for multitudes of saints. After Bede’s time there is silence until the Englishman St Ailred writes of Ninian in the 12th century, with no known additional sources for facts. It is true, though, that verses praising Ninian were sent by students at York to the Englishman Alcuin, the culture tsar for Charlemagne. These were discovered before the First World War and are kept at Bamberg in Bavaria.

Some lives of Irish saints do mention a British monastery of “Rosnat”. This was taken by later biographers of Ninian as a name for Whithorn, Galloway. Dr Breeze, writing in the Welsh Journal of Religious History (Vol 7), is convinced that “Rosnat was surely in Cornwall, near Truro”. This is supported by an old Cornish play on St Kea, which came to light in 2007. It refers to the saint’s place of residence (now called Old Kea) as in Rosewa or Rosene.

At Whithorn, archaeologists found parts of a plastered wall, but no evidence of a pre-English monastic site, or even one that was specifically Christian. Whithorn’s status as Ninian’s supposed mission station to convert the Picts is undermined by the fact that Picts did not live in Galloway.

Pilgrimages to Whithorn in Ninian’s memory were promoted later by King David (1124-53) and throve. In the Middle Ages, devotion to Ninian spread as far as Elsinore, Denmark, where an altar in St Olaf’s church was dedicated to him.

Christian writers later made of Ninian what they wanted. A Protestant such as Charles Edwards in 17th-century Wales recruited him as a British proto-Protestant preacher, Dr Breeze notes, while in the 18th century a Catholic like Philip Perry, rector of the English College in Vallodolid, Spain, could present him as a “holy prelate” trained in Rome.

It was, as Dr Breeze points out, Professor Thomas Clancy of Glasgow University who in 2001 proposed that Ninian was a scribal error for Uinnian, in other words St Finnian of Moville, a sixth-century British missionary in Ireland. It looks as though Ninian is no more than a spelling mistake.